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Muslims Holocausts and Genocide

Muslim's Holocausts and Genocide Remembrance Day

By Syed Soharwardy, Muslims Against Terrorism (M.A.T.)

In the history of mankind it never happened before that so many human beings suffered and continuously struggled to survive for more than a century without any help from outside. In the past, whenever a calamity came upon a certain community either they were completely wiped out from the face of this earth or someone from outside came and helped them in getting out of calamity or they themselves struggled so hard that they defeated the cause of calamities, hence ending the period of calamity. Moreover, it never happened that at one time so many communities remained under calamities for such a long period. Please look around and see what is going on in this world? Muslims in various parts of the world have been under siege and there seems to be no way out for them. But the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said that all Muslims are like a body. If a part of the body suffers the entire body suffers. I am sure what Allah's Messenger (peace be upon him) have said can not be wrong but there is a possibility that we may not be that kind of Muslims which Prophet (Peace be upon him) meant in this Hadith.

The Holocausts and Genocide of Muslims have taken place in the past and recently. But it seems that the people in the western world do not know enough about them and there is a need to create awareness about it. As the Muslims in the western world are still struggling to make their place in the society, it is critical that our Christian friends know these facts and understand the situation of Muslim Ummah. After the World War II the Jewish community was so successful in making the Christians believe that the Christians have victimized them. They have made Christians so guilty conscious that the majority of Christians not only sympathize with the Jewish community but they feel obligated to pay back the Jewish community whatever they can by supporting every action of Jewish community.

Muslims do not need to make anybody guilty of conscious. We just need to communicate with our Christian friends in their language and terminology. I am sure they will understand but Muslims have to take the first step. We want to make sure that the people must recognize and believe in the other Holocausts and genocide as well as the World War II Holocaust.

Let's review few Holocausts and Genocide of Muslims around the world.

• Palestine: The Muslim community of Palestine has been struggling for their survival and freedom for almost a century. The Palestinian community was struggling for their homeland long before the creation of Israel. They were expecting to have their homeland when the British leave the area but when British left the area they created Israel not Palestine. After the creation of Israel, the Jewish people of Israel not only captured the homes and lands of poor Palestinians but they also denied them the right of existence in their own homeland. Since 1948 the calamities for the Palestinian people have increased instead of decreasing. Presently, what Israeli forces are doing to Palestinians is worse than the Holocaust of the World War II. There is no doubt in my mind that the Jewish community suffered a lot during world war II from the hands of Nazis and almost six million Jews were killed in that Holocaust. However, all these calamities ended on the Jewish people when the allied forces got victory. The Jewish community was liberated with the help from USA and allied forces. On the other side, the Palestinians have been struggling on their own against a power (Israel + USA + worldwide Jewish and allied communities) which is 100 times more resourceful than the Palestinians. Palestinians have no support from their own Arab brothers. Palestinians have no support from the Muslims of the world. Whatever Palestinians get from the Arab and Muslim world is no more than a lip service. Apparently, we do not see any end to these calamities on the Palestinians in the near future. So far, more than over a million Palestinians have been killed, millions of them have made refugees, and millions of them are in the concentration camps. The Israeli forces have converted Palestinian homes and areas into concentration camps.

• Chechnya: The Muslim community of Chechnya has been struggling for their survival and freedom for almost a century. During early 1900s the Russian forces illegally occupied Chechan land and later Russian government annexed it and made it part of Russia against the will of Chechans. The severity of Russian oppression on Chechnya is so grave that the Russian government looted all the resources of Chechnya such as oil, coal and other minerals and built the European part of Russia while denied the Chechan Muslims any part of their own wealth. Chechnya is one of the least developed areas of Russian Federation. After the collapse of Soviet Union Chechnya announced its independence from Russia. Since then, the Russian forces have carried out the Genocide and Holocaust of Chechan Muslims. Thousands of Muslims have been killed. Buildings have been destroyed. The entire infrastructure of Chechnya has been collapsed. Women have been publicly raped. Their brothers, fathers and husbands have been mutilated in front of them. Just like Palestinians Chechans got no help from the governments of Muslim countries except the lip service. The western governments are the most hypocrites. On one side they want to resolve the Chechnya issue peacefully but on the other side they are providing all the support and the resources to Russian Military to crush the Chechan Muslims.

• Kashmir: The Muslims of Kashmir have been struggling for their freedom for the last two centuries. For the first 145 years they fought the war against the British rule along with the people of India. Finally, when the people of India succeeded in getting independence from Britain in 1947, the Kashmiri Muslims thought that they would also be independent from the rule of non-Muslims. When the British left India, the country was divided into countries. The Muslim majority areas of India became independent country called Pakistan and the remaining Hindu dominated areas became a separate country called India. According to the agreed upon formula of division Muslim dominated areas should have joined Pakistan but the departing British rulers divided the border in such a way that it became very easy for India to annex this beautiful and full of resources land of Muslims into India. After the independence, Pakistan fought a war in early fifties and captured some of the area of Kashmir. But this did not help in reducing the miseries of the Muslims of Kashmir. For the past 55 years India is systematically changing the demographics of Kashmir. Thousands of Muslims have been killed. The Indian forces have carried out the Genocide of Muslims in Kashmir openly and deliberately. There is no house in Indian held Kashmir where at least one or more family members have not been killed by the Indian army. Every Muslim home is under a siege. Women's have been raped. Children have been kidnapped or killed. Muslims are forced to leave Kashmir. For every Muslim house in Kashmir there are three Indian soldiers. Again, Kashmiri Muslims have no help from any Muslim government. They are fighting against an enemy who is 100 times more resourceful and powerful. The west has completely closed its eyes on Kashmir. The Genocide continues in Kashmir and apparently no one cares.

• Bosnia and Kossovo: The conflict in Bosnia Herzgovina and Kossovo is fresh in our memories. The largest Holocaust and Genocide in the recent history of Europe after the Holocaust of Word War II was created against the Muslims of Bosnia and Kossovo. More than half million Muslims were killed, Almost all the adult male population of Bosnia and Kossovo was sent into concentration camps. Women and children were not only tortured and raped but they were forced to kill their own relatives with their own hands. Millions of Muslims were made refugees to take shelter around the world. This genocide and Holocaust took place while the European and America forces were there. They saw it, and pretended, as they were helpless. The United Nations forces, which included Europeans and Americans, supposed to protect the safe heavens for Bosnian Muslims but they failed and thousands of Muslims were slaughtered in front of them. Imagine a hypothetical situation, if instead of Bosnian Muslims few hundred American would have been slaughtered by the Serbs, would the UN forces just had watched it helplessly like they watched the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims? Off course, not. The Holocaust of Bosnian and Kossovar Muslims was carried out by a conspiracy of eliminating Muslims from Europe. That conspiracy failed. Otherwise, the plan was to remove any chances of a Muslim state in Europe.

The situation in Bosnia Herzgovina, Kossovo and Macedonia has been temporarily settled. This is all artificial, because the problem has not been resolved permanently. The conditions under which Muslims are living are not very much different from the conditions that started the conflict in first place. Bosnia Herzegovina is still divided on the ethnic lines. There are pockets of each community and they do not talk to each other. Any small incident can flare up the old wounds and situation will go back to mid 1990s situation. In Kossovo and Macedonia the situation is similar. Both Kossovo and Macedonia are divided on ethnic lines. Forcing the people to live together while they do not want to live together will not solve the problem permanently. To solve the problem permanently Kossovo must get its freedom and Macedonia should be divided into autonomous regions.

• Muslim States in Russian Federation: The history of Muslims in the present Russian Federation goes back to several centuries. But during the past two centuries the Russian forces have occupied most of the Muslim states, which used to surround Russia. Even after the fall of Soviet Union, there are still many Muslim states, which have been illegally annexed into Russia. Chechnya is one of them. Ingushetia, Kergyzia, Ossetia, Turkamania and many other states in Siberia are all Muslim states which have been annexed into Russian Federation against the will of the people of these lands. If a fair and open referendum is held today and people given a chance to vote without any fear of persecution, many Muslim states will choose to breakout from the Russian Federation. The reason is very clear. Since the annexation of these Muslim States into Russia, the Russian governments have been using and exporting the resources of these Muslim states to develop and flourish the regions around Moscow and leaving these areas undeveloped and backward. The Muslims of these states and regions do not even have access to basic human needs such as education, drinking water, transportation, health care, etc.?The Muslim population of these states has any power. The puppets in the parliament represent them. Since Muslims of these states do not have access to education, therefore, they are not well educated which creates a huge vacuum for the leadership of these Muslims. The standard of living of these poor Muslims is worse while their regions are the wealthiest in Russian Federation for their natural and mineral resources.

Muslims in China: There are more than 50 million Muslims live in China. The ancient record of the Tang Dynasty describes a landmark visit to China by Saad ibn Abi Waqqas (May Allah be pleased with him), one of the companions of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in 650 A.D. The Chinese emperor Yung-Wei respected the teachings of Islam and considered it to be compatible with the teachings of Confucius. To show his admiration for Islam, the emperor approved the establishment of China's first mosque at Ch'ang-an. That mosque still stands today after fourteen centuries.

Anti-Muslim sentiments took root in China during the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644 - 1911 A.D.), which was established by Manchus who were a minority in China. Muslims in China number more than 50 million, according to unofficial counts. They represent ten distinct ethnic groups. The largest are the Chinese Hui, who comprise over half of China's Muslim population. The largest of Turkic groups are the Uygurs who are most populous in the province of Xinjiang, where they were once an overwhelming majority. This overwhelming majority of Muslims has slowly been reduced but still Muslims are in majority.

The reduction in Muslim population has been drastic during the communist regime of China. So far all the communist governments have seen Muslims as threat and they have killed more than half million Muslims during the communist party rule. The ethnic cleansing of Muslims is continuously going on in China for the last fifty years. Muslims can not worship openly. The areas of Muslim majority have been kept undeveloped and when a Muslim wants to improve his / her standard of living he /she has no choice but to leave the area. When he / she arrives in the developed areas of China they are no more allowed to practice their religion openly.

Today, the entire western world cries for the hard time faced by the followers of Falun Gong movement but no one cries on the genocide of Chinese Muslims. Whenever, the Western governments talk about the human rights issues in China they always mention Falun Gong and Christians. At least, I have never heard any western leader mentioning the Muslims of China. The most unfortunate situation with the Chinese Muslims is that the Muslim countries themselves do not want to talk about them because of the good relations between Chinese government and the Muslims countries. At least the other oppressed Muslims get little lip service from Muslim governments and Chinese Muslims do not even get that.

• Cambodian Muslims: When the civil war in Cambodia took place during Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime, millions of Cambodians were sentenced to death. Among those millions of Cambodians, thousands of Muslims were also murdered. Mosques and Islamic schools were destroyed. Many Islamic institutions were closed. Muslims were forced to step on the Holy Qur'an and eat pig which is against their religious beliefs. The genocide of Cambodian Muslims was not even considered worth mentioning in the media including media in the Muslim world. There are many other countries where Muslims are not allowed to identify themselves as Muslims and practice their religion with freedom. If they try to practice their religion, they become victims of hatred and oppression or face genocide. The oppression of Muslims by the Muslims is also on the rise. Muslims are not allowed to practice Islam in many Muslim countries such as Turkey, Algeria, Tajikistan, Uzbukistan, Qazakistan, Azerbaijan, etc. In many Muslim countries Muslims are not allowed to democratically elect their own government. Most of the Muslim governments are secular and are symbol of oppression.

The battle of Cawnpore - the entire British garrison died at Cawnpore (now Kanpur), either in the battle or later massacred with women and children. Their deaths became a war cry for the British. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty

A controversial new history of the Indian Mutiny, which broke out 150 years ago and is acknowledged to have been the greatest challenge to any European power in the 19th century, claims that the British pursued a murderous decade-long campaign to wipe out millions of people who dared rise up against them. In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai, argues that there was an "untold holocaust" which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857. Britain was then the world's superpower but, says Misra, came perilously close to losing its most prized possession: India.

Conventional histories have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in savage reprisals, but none have tallied the number of rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order, claims Misra.

The author says he was surprised to find that the "balance book of history" could not say how many Indians were killed in the aftermath of 1857. This is remarkable, he says, given that in an age of empires, nothing less than the fate of the world hung in the balance.

"It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. It was simple and brutal. Indians who stood in their way were killed. But its scale has been kept a secret," Misra told the Guardian.

His calculations rest on three principal sources. Two are records pertaining to the number of religious resistance fighters killed - either Islamic mujahideen or Hindu warrior ascetics committed to driving out the British.

The third source involves British labour force records, which show a drop in manpower of between a fifth and a third across vast swaths of India, which as one British official records was "on account of the undisputed display of British power, necessary during those terrible and wretched days - millions of wretches seemed to have died."

There is a macabre undercurrent in much of the correspondence. In one incident Misra recounts how 2m letters lay unopened in government warehouses, which, according to civil servants, showed "the kind of vengeance our boys must have wreaked on the abject Hindoos and Mohammadens, who killed our women and children."

Misra's casualty claims have been challenged in India and Britain. "It is very difficult to assess the extent of the reprisals simply because we cannot say for sure if some of these populations did not just leave a conflict zone rather than being killed," said Shabi Ahmad, head of the 1857 project at the Indian Council of Historical Research. "It could have been migration rather than murder that depopulated areas."

Many view exaggeration rather than deceit in Misra's calculations. A British historian, Saul David, author of The Indian Mutiny, said it was valid to count the death toll but reckoned that it ran into "hundreds of thousands".

"It looks like an overestimate. There were definitely famines that cost millions of lives, which were exacerbated by British ruthlessness. You don't need these figures or talk of holocausts to hammer imperialism. It has a pretty bad track record."

Others say Misra has done well to unearth anything in that period, when the British assiduously snuffed out Indian versions of history. "There appears a prolonged silence between 1860 and the end of the century where no native voices are heard. It is only now that these stories are being found and there is another side to the story," said Amar Farooqui, history professor at Delhi University. "In many ways books like Misra's and those of [William] Dalrymple show there is lots of material around. But you have to look for it."

What is not in doubt is that in 1857 Britain ruled much of the subcontinent in the name of the Bahadur Shah Zafar, the powerless poet-king improbably descended from Genghis Khan.

Neither is there much dispute over how events began: on May 10 Indian soldiers, both Muslim and Hindu, who were stationed in the central Indian town of Meerut revolted and killed their British officers before marching south to Delhi. The rebels proclaimed Zafar, then 82, emperor of Hindustan and hoisted a saffron flag above the Red Fort.

What follows in Misra's view was nothing short of the first war of Indian independence, a story of a people rising to throw off the imperial yoke. Critics say the intentions and motives were more muddled: a few sepoys misled into thinking the officers were threatening their religious traditions. In the end British rule prevailed for another 90 years.

Misra's analysis breaks new ground by claiming the fighting stretched across India rather than accepting it was localised around northern India. Misra says there were outbreaks of anti-British violence in southern Tamil Nadu, near the Himalayas, and bordering Burma. "It was a pan-Indian thing. No doubt."

Misra also claims that the uprisings did not die out until years after the original mutiny had fizzled away, countering the widely held view that the recapture of Delhi was the last important battle.

For many the fact that Indian historians debate 1857 from all angles is in itself a sign of a historical maturity. "You have to see this in the context of a new, more confident India," said Jon E Wilson, lecturer in south Asian history at King's College London. "India has a new relationship with 1857. In the 40s and 50s the rebellions were seen as an embarrassment. All that fighting, when Nehru and Gandhi preached nonviolence. But today 1857 is becoming part of the Indian national story. That is a big change."

What they said

Charles Dickens: "I wish I were commander-in-chief in India ... I should proclaim to them that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race."
Karl Marx: "The question is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton."
L'Estaffette, French newspaper: "Intervene in favour of the Indians, launch all our squadrons on the seas, join our efforts with those of Russia against British India ...such is the only policy truly worthy of the glorious traditions of France."
The Guardian: "We sincerely hope that the terrible lesson thus taught will never be forgotten ... We may rely on native bayonets, but they must be officered by Europeans."

We all know Hitler caused the biggest genocide on earth; he eliminated approximately six million Jews and half a million Gypsies. The Holocaust is the most widely known and despised event in world history. I argue that during World War II in India, the undivided Bengal witnessed the greatest passive-Holocaust in the world and it was all courtesy of the British who were "administering" India at the time.

Compared to what happened in India, Hitler looks pretty amateurish, doesn't he? The winners always write history and it is not unusual that this havoc was covered under a façade of natural calamity, but the catastrophe was actually man made.

Let's unveil the reality a little. 1770 -- Bengal faced the most severe famine in the history, approximately 10 million people evaporated. The British took over the country five years earlier; but no one could pinpoint them for the havoc. Actually it started because of a severe drought, but certainly the British didn't take any measure to reduce the effect. In fact, their revenue collection in 1771 surpassed the Rs. 15.21 million collected in 1768 by Rs. 52,000. No wonder 10 million people starved to death. Then in 1942 -- United Kingdom had suffered a disastrous defeat at Singapore against the Japanese military, which then proceeded to conquer Burma (Now Myanmar) from the British in the same year. At that point Myanmar was the highest rice exporting country in the world and 15% of India's rice came from Myanmar. In Bengal the proportion was slightly higher because of the state's proximity to Myanmar. British authorities feared a subsequent Japanese invasion of British India through Bengal, and they started stockpiling food for British soldiers to prevent access to supplies by the Japanese in case of an invasion. To implement that strategy the British ruthlessly enforced a "boat denial scheme" and then a "rice denial scheme."

The first policy confiscated almost 66,500 boats/ships which eventually collapsed the economy -- fishing became impossible, so was the exporting/importing of food. The second policy allowed the free merchants to purchase rice at any price and sell it back to the government for stocking in the governmental food storage. On one hand it increased the price of rice but on the other it created an artificial food shortage which finally dampened the effect of "Quit India movement." I was talking to a friend recently about the German Holocaust and he mentioned this British incident, saying, "probably we Indians are either pretty forgiving or forgetful... we don't talk much about this greatest man-made holocaust possible on earth..." I instantly understood why nobody really knows what happened in India because attention was cleverly directed towards the natural calamity to cover the brutal fact of deliberate starvation to provide a good night's sleep to the rest of the world. Should India have been forced to accept the offer?

==========================

More Holocaust in the 1900s

7 million people died in India during British induced famine 1942-1943. Churchill had direct order to starve Indians, who he said were "beastly race with beastly religion". 40 famines were in Bengal during British rule alone!

Bengal is a land of rivers and most fertile land of Ganges delta. Bengal was a granary of India till British came in. Every village had, and still has, a pond, which has fishes that can feed the village even when there is no rice. It needed British intervention to convert the lush green land of Bengal into famine-starved land.

Bengal had 30 or 40 famines (depending on how one defines famine) during 182 years of British rule in Bengal. There are no reliable accounts of the number of people who died in these famines. We have only the figures put out by British colonialists. But even given the limited data availability, once can see the barbaric face of British colonialism in India.

The last big famine in Bengal occurred between 1942 and 1945. At least four million people died during these three years. Some scholars believe that the number of dead was much higher (remember that the figure of four million is based on British sources). Notwithstanding the controversy about the number of dead, it is widely accepted that the famine was man-made. Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, has demonstrated quite convincingly that the famine deaths were caused by British policies and not by drastic slump in food production.

Bengal was overcrowded with refugees as well as with retreating soldiers from various British colonies which were temporarily occupied by the Japanese. In March 1942 alone, around 2,000 to 3,000 British soldiers and civilians arrived every day in Calcutta and Chittagong, and in the month of May, a total of 300,000 were counted. As a result of the massive food purchases by the government, food prices in the countryside skyrocketed.

Expecting a Japanese landing in the Gulf of Bengal, the British authorities enacted the so-called "Boat-Denial Scheme" leading to confiscation of all boats and ships in the Gulf of Bengal which could carry more than 10 persons. This resulted in not less than 66,500 confiscated boats. Consequently, the inland navigation system collapsed completely. Fishing became practically impossible, and many rice and jute farmers could not ship their goods anymore. Subsequently the economy collapsed completely, especially in the lower Ganges-Delta.

The confiscations of land in connection with military fortifications and constructions (airplane landing places, military and refugee camps) led to the expulsion of about 150,000 to 180,000 people from their land, turning them practically into homeless persons.

Food deliveries from other parts of the country to Bengal were refused by the government in order to make food artificially scarce. This was an especially cruel policy introduced in 1942 under the title "Rice Denial Scheme." The purpose of it was, as mentioned earlier, to deny an efficient food supply to the Japanese after a possible invasion. Simultaneously, the government authorized free merchants to purchase rice at any price and to sell it to the government for delivery into governmental food storage. So, on one hand government was buying every grain of rice that was around and on the other hand, it was blocking grain from coming into Bengal from other regions of the country.

The blank check of the government (for food purchases) triggered price inflation. As a result, some merchants did not deliver food to the government but hoarded it, hoping for higher profit margins when selling it later. This led to further food shortages on the market and to further price increases.

In addition to this inflationary thrust, massive military activities in Bengal were basically financed by overtime of money printing presses. Oversupply of paper money by Government led to a general inflation, which hit the impoverished population in the countryside especially hard.

Educated Indians are aware of the ghastly 2-century imposition of British colonialism on India. However, because history is generally written by non-scientists, most Indians are utterly unaware of the horrendous human cost (1.8 billion violent and non-violent avoidable deaths in the period 1757-1947).

The “avoidable deaths” (from violence, deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease) in British India totaled 1.5 billion (or 1.8 billion if you include the so-called Native States). About 20% of the victims (about 350 million) were Muslims.

Dr Gideon Polya (2009): "I am a 4-decade career research scientist (and still giving theory and laboratory courses to second year university science students at a leading Australian university). I have addressed this British carnage in India in a quantitative fashion, using the parameter of “avoidable death” (excess death, avoidable mortality, excess mortality, untimely death, deaths that should not have happened) which is defined as the difference between the actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a pweaceful, decently run country with the same demographics (see my book “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://mwcnews.net/Gideon-Polya and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ).

The “avoidable deaths” (from violence, deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease) in British India totalled 1.5 billion (or 1.8 billion if you include the so-called Native States).

Major British-imposed genocidal events in India included the Great Bengal Famine (10 million dead, 1769-1770), successive famines that killed scores of millions of Indians up to the World War 2 Bengal Famine (6-7 million dead in Bengal and surrounding provinces; see the recent BBC broadcast involving me, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/...programme.html ), the estimated 10 million Indians murdered by the British in reprisals for the so-called Indian Mutiny (in which 2,000 British were killed) and the underlying British-imposed condition of “living on the edge” that was responsible for most of the “avoidable deaths” (see my book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 1998, 2008: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ).

A cogent summary has been given by outstanding Indian ecofeminist and physicist Dr Vandana Shiva (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva ) : “The British created a group of owners of land who would then be the rent collectors, who would then finance the empire and meantime people were losing their land. And this had simultaneous impact on hunger because if all your surplus is being extracted to pay taxes then the very producers of food go hungry, which is why 2 million people [6-7 million] died in the Bengal famine of 1942 [1943-1945]. Not because there wasn’t enough rice in India — we were exporting rice for the war — but because of the way the free trade rights of commerce were higher than the rights of people to eat. And the entire force of the British empire was being used to extract the last amount of paddy from the peasants” (see Dr Vandana Shiva, “Colonisation and Independence”: http://www.abc.net.au/specials/shiva/pg04.htm ) .

Even mass murderer and Indian-hater Winston Churchill who deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death in the World War 2 Bengal Famine (see “Media lying over Churchill’s crimes. British Indian Holocaust: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/26713/42/ and “Anglo holocaust commission, ignore and denial. Churchill’s crimes from Indian Holocaust to Palestinian Genocide“: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/28002/42/ ) confessed to this “living on the edge” reality for Indians under the British back in 1935 in a speech to the UK House of Commons: “In the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation, and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people, who have come into the world at your invitation and under the shield and protection of British power” (see Chapter 14, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 1998, 2008: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ).

History ignored yields history repeated and the continuing horrendous carnage of 16 million global avoidable deaths annually (3.7 million in India alone, 5.3 million in South Asia) still stalks the world due to violence, deprivation, disease and LYING. Just as the British Mainstream has largely deleted British atrocities in India out of history books and public consciousness, so Western Mainstream media, politician and academic lying about current Western atrocities in the Occupied Palestinina, Iraqi and Afghan Territories ensures their horrendous continuance.

Racist White Australia was a loyal, racist, “white” part of the racist British Empire and is now a loyal associate of the “politically correct racist” (PC racist) US Empire (that mass murders Asians while pretending that it is bringing them “democracy”) .

The racist White Australian Mainstream Establishment is remorselessly (albeit secretly) committed to a sustained policy of complicity in US-imposed genocides coupled with holocaust ignoring and holocaust denial.

The following self-explanatory letter about the Indian Holocaust, Climate Genocide and Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) holocaust denial has been sent to media, MPs and to the Australian taxpayer-funded ABC, unfortunately the best of the awful Mainstream media in Australia, the Land of Flies, Lies and Slies (spin-based untruths). The silence has been deafening.

----
Dear Sir/Madam,

In the 1943-1945 Bengal Famine 6-7 million Indians were deliberately starved to death by the British in British-occupied India in a forgotten Bengali Holocaust that occurred at the same time as the Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) that was part of a wider but forgotten WW2 European Holocaust in general (30 million Slav, Jewish and Roma dead). [1]

Yet a search of over 3 million pages of the Australian taxpayer-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) records reveals only 4 ABC broadcast references to the “Bengal Famine” and due to Dr Gideon Polya (2), Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen (1) and ecofeminist physicist Dr Vandana Shiva (1), respectively – whereas a search for “Holocaust” reveals 25 ABC broadcast references to the Jewish Holocaust in the first few months of 2009 alone. [2]

Any holocaust denial is repugnant and is also dangerous because “history ignored yields history repeated”. The appalling Australian ABC record of dishonest, racist and unethical holocaust denial demands urgent exposure and redress – Australian holocaust denial threatens Australia, the Developing World and the Planet. [4]

The UK British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has produced a book and a lavish, 6-part TV series called “The Story of India”. However the 6th episode that deals with India under the British manages to completely ignore horrendous, repeated British-imposed atrocities on a scale of death greater than that of the World War 2 (WW2) Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation), most notably the 1769-1770 Bengal Famine (10 million dead), the WW2 Bengal Famine (6-7 million dead) and the British India Holocaust in general that was associated with 1.8 billion excess Indian deaths in the period 1757-1947. [1, 2].

Indeed in the TV series “The Story of India” the very word “Famine” is not even mentioned as such even once – the presenter Michael Wood refers to “famine-stricken refugees” in talking about 18th century British military campaigns in the South of India and, later in the Indian Holocaust-ignoring 6th episode, an image is given of a volume in the Indian National Library with the title “Famine”. Just imagine the outcry in the West - and indeed around the World – if the BBC produced a lavish TV series entitled “The Story of Germany” and failed to mention its millennium history of massacring Jews and culminating in the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) and the WW2 Holocaust in general (30 million Slav, Jewish and Roma deaths).

Does the BBC somehow regard Indians or non-Europeans in general as somehow Lesser Creatures in deleting horrendous British atrocities from “The Story of India”?

Does the BBC secretly subscribe to the views of a succession of racist Englishmen who regarded Indians in much the same way as the German Nazis regarded Jews i.e. as untermenschen [sub-humans]?
Here, with documentation, is a sample of 7 of those views – but before reading them see the following image of starving Indians in British India circa 1900: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/26713/42/ (of course there are no such images in the BBC’s sanitized “The Story of India”). [3].

1. Lord Hastings (Lord Moira, Marquess of Hastings and Governor-General of India, 1813-1823) (1813): “The Hindoo appears a being nearly limited to mere animal functions and even in them indifferent. Their proficiency and skill in the several lines of occupation to which they are restricted, are little more than the dexterity of which any animal with a similar conformation but with no higher intellect than a dog, an elephant, or a monkey, might be supposed to be capable of attaining. It is enough to see this in order to have full conviction that such a people can at no period have been more advanced in civil policy.” [4].

2. Charles Dickens (circa 1857): “I wish I were Commander in Chief over there [India]! I would address that Oriental character which must be powerfully spoken to, in something like the following placard, which should be vigorously translated into all native dialects, “I, The Inimitable, holding this office of mine, and firmly believing that I hold it by the permission of Heaven and not by the appointment of Satan, have the honor to inform you Hindoo gentry that it is my intention, with all possible avoidance of unnecessary cruelty and with all merciful swiftness of execution, to exterminate the Race from the face of the earth, which disfigured the earth with the late abominable atrocities [2,000 British killed in the 1857 Indian War of Independence aka the 1857 Indian Mutiny]”. [5].
3. Report of the Indian Famine Commission 1880 (arguing against generous famine relief): “the great object of saving life and giving protection from extreme suffering may not only be as well secured, but in fact will be far better secured, if proper care be taken to prevent the abuse and demoralisation which all experience shows to be the consequence of ill-directed and excessive distribution of charitable relief.” [6].

4. Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India on the 1900 Indian Famine, January 1900 (arguing against generous famine relief): “In my judgement any government which imperilled the financial position of India in the interests of a prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism. But any government which, by indiscriminate alms-giving, weakened the fibre and demoralised the self-reliance of the population would be guilty of a public crime.” [7].

5. Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons (1935): “In the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation, and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people, who have come into the world at your invitation and under the shield and protection of British power.” [8].

6. Winston Churchill to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India (1942): “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” [9].

7. Winston Churchill (1953) (in an egregious act of Nobel Prize-winning Holocaust Denial in which he totally wipes out any mention of the 6-7 million Indians he deliberately starved to death in 1943-1945): “No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the peoples of Hindustan. They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small Island.” [10].

Here is a list of immense British atrocities in its over 2 centuries of genocidal mis-rule in India (substantially from 1757-1947) that were simply not noticed by the BBC’s TV series “The Story of India” (for detailed histories of India, details of British atrocities in India and detailed documentation see my books “Body Count” and “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History”). [1, 2].

1. 1769-1770 Bengal Famine (10 million dead).

2. Other pre-20th Century famines in British India, in particular those in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa (1769-1770), Rajasthan, Oudh and elsewhere in northern India (1782-84), Rajasthan, Bombay, Gujarat and north-western provinces (1812-1815), north-western provinces, Punjab and Rajasthan (1837-1838), Madras, Deccan, Bihar, Bengal and particularly Orissa (1866; 3 million dead), Rajasthan and northern India (1868-1870), and throughout much of India from Hyderabad to Rajasthan and the Punjab (1899-1900; millions dying).

3. 25 million Indian cholera deaths in 19 th century India due to British transmission of the disease from Bengal by rail and sea (and by sea around the world).

4. 1.5 billion Indian excess deaths in the period 1757-1947 (1.8 billion excess deaths in the British-dominated Native States are included).

5. 17 million Indians died in the Spanish influenza pandemic (1918-1923) out of a world total of about 50 million, this being exacerbated by the return of hundreds of thousands Indian soldiers from WW1 and British Empire commerce.

6. 1943-1945 Bengal Famine (first WW2 atrocity to be described as a “Holocaust” – by Jog in 1944; 6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death by the British under Churchill; see the 2008 BBC “confessional” broadcast involving myself, 1998 Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen of Harvard University, medical historian Dr Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Wellcome Institute, University College London, and other scholars: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/
bengalfamine_programme.html ). [11].

How did the BBC’s “The Story of India” manage not to notice this 2 centuries of appalling carnage that is unprecedented in human history in its sheer magnitude?

The BBC’s TV version of “The Story of India” did qualitatively (if not quantitatively) notice Indian collateral damage in South Indian British wars and brutal British reprisals after the 1857 “Indian Mutiny”. In addition, the book version mentions the 1866 Orissa Famine (3 million dead) but attributes this to the El Nino meteorological phenomenon and makes passing reference to British administrative failure: “In the almost thirty years since the Mutiny they [educated Indians] had seen for themselves the failure of British government in many key areas, but especially in the basic one of providing food and security to the population” (p281).

What “The Story of India” resolutely ignores is the merciless British policy for over 2 centuries of keeping the Indian population on the edge of starvation (see Winston Churchill’s 1935 speech quoted above) – this deliberate strategy enabling a relatively small number of British troops and much larger numbers of well-fed Indian sepoys to keep several hundred million Indians subjugated.

What a disgrace! Tell everyone you can – because history ignored yields history repeated. South Asia is currently under immense threat from First World-imposed global warming. Many scientists now doubt that we can avoid further damaging temperature increases to over 2C above that in 1900. According to top UK climate scientist Dr James Lovelock FRS fewer than 1 billion people (mostly European) will survive the century due to First World profligacy and unaddressed man-made climate change – this translating to 10 billion deaths (mostly of non-Europeans, 3 billion Muslims, 2 billion Indians) in an already-commenced Climate Holocaust and Climate Genocide. [12].

Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Tell everyone you can (a) about Western holocaust commission and holocaust denial and (b) how they can act to help save India from a 2 billion-victim, First World-imposed Climate Genocide and help save Muslims from a looming First World-imposed, climate change-based, 3 billion-victim, Muslim Holocaust.

[4]. Lord Hastings (1813), Private Journal I, p30 quoted by Spear (1971), p198 [Spear, P. (1971) The Nabobs. A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India (Peter Smith, Gloucester, Massachusetts)] and by Plumb (1963), p178 [Plumb, J.H. (1963), England in the Eighteenth Century (Penguin Books, London) ].

Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003: http://www.amazon.com/Biochemical-Ta.../dp/0415308291 ). He has recently published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ and http://mwcnews.net/Gideon-Polya) and an updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History, Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2008: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ). He is currently teaching Biochemistry theory and practical courses to second year university agricultural science students at a very good Australian university.

Recently Countercurrents published an expert analysis by outstanding US medical epidemiologists Professor Burnham (Johns Hopkins University ) and Professor Roberts (Columbia University) in which they commented trenchantly on the Mainstream media NON-reportage of the latest UK ORB survey indicating over 1 million violent post-invasion Iraqi deaths (see Countercurrents: http://www.countercurrents.org/burnham230907.htm ) . These world’s top medical epidemiologists concluded that, QUOTE: “Ignorance of Iraq death toll [is] no longer an option … Established methods for estimating deaths exist, even in times of war. Discussion of trends and policy effects based on meaningful and validated measures such as median income and death rates would make our leaders more accountable and leave us better informed. Deliberately ignoring the numbers of dead Iraqis is not an option worthy of the United States , or in our enlightened self-interest.”

The following analysis reveals that the total VIOLENT and NON-VIOLENT post-invasion Iraqi excess deaths now total 1.5-2.0 million and that the total excess deaths in the Bush I and Bush II Asian Wars now total 8 MILLION.

Mainstream media ignoring of this horrendous, ongoing mass murdering of ethnically or culturally SEMITIC Indigenous peoples amounts to near-comprehensive anti-Semitic Holocaust Denial. However, as pointed out by Professors Burnham and Roberts, such DENIAL is very dangerous both for the victims and the perpetrators.

The top UK market research company ORB has recently reported 1.2 million post-invasion VIOLENT DEATHS in Occupied Iraq, this being consonant with an estimate of 0.8 million VIOLENT DEATHS (as of October 2007) from top American medical epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins and Columbia, published in the top medical journal The Lancet and endorsed in a public letter by 27 top medical experts.

Post-invasion excess deaths in Occupied Iraq include VIOLENT DEATHS estimated to be 0.8 million (world’s top medical epidemiologists published in The Lancet) to 1.2 million (the recent estimate of the top UK ORB market analysis and polling organization). The post-invasion NON-VIOLENT DEATHS total 0.7 million (as estimated from UN Population Division data) to 0.8 million (as estimated from UNICEF under-5 infant mortality data as per “Layperson’s Guide to Counting Iraq Deaths”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26/ ). The TOTAL post-invasion excess deaths amount to 1.5 million to 2.0 million (see “Iraq: Genocide by all Definition. Bush’s Iraq war. 2 million excess deaths”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/17066/42/ ).

Use of the Iraq Body Count estimate of “81,000 deaths” for post-invasion Iraqi civilians deaths (e.g. by, of all people, Anti-war.com: http://antiwar.com/casualties/ ) is instantly discredited by a simple inspection of the UNICEF website (see: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html ) that indicates 122,000 under-5 year old Iraqi infant s deaths ANNUALLY - 90% avoidable and due to Occupier war crimes, specifically the non-provision of life-sustaining requisites unequivocally demanded of Occupiers by the Geneva Convention.

The Iraq Body Count estimate of (currently) “81,000” Iraqi deaths (MIS-used by Mainstream media and by extreme right-wing Bush-ite and neo-Bush-ite politicians AND by Anti-war.com) (a) IGNORES NON-VIOLENT DEATHS, (b) is about 7-10% of the independent estimates of the world’s top medical epidemiologists and a top UK poling company and (c) its reliance on media reports and releases is notoriously unreliable as testified by world’s experts on the matter e.g. Professors Burnham (Johns Hopkins) and Roberts (Columbia) (see: http://www.countercurrents.org/burnham230907.htm and http://members5.boardhost.com/medial...190468011.html ):

QUOTE: “News report tallies suggest some 75,000 Iraqis have died since the US-led invasion. A study of 13 war affected countries presented at a recent Harvard conference found over 80% of violent deaths in conflicts go unreported by the press and governments.”

IT GETS WORSE. The total death toll in the Bush I and Bush II Asian Wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon) now totals 8 million (EIGHT MILLION as summarized below (for a detailed and documented breakdown see “United State Terrorism. 8 million Deaths & Media Holocaust Denial: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/17139/42/ ):

2. US-backed Apartheid Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (1967-2007) [0.31 million] – 1957-2007 excess deaths in the Occupied Palestinian Territory totalled about 0.3 million; about 10,000 Palestinians were violently killed (5,000 in the 2000-2007 Second Intifada period alone).

3. US Gulf War (1990-1991) [0.2 million] – an estimated 0.2 million violent Iraqi deaths due to the Bush I Gulf War.

4. US Sanctions War (1990-2003) [1.7 million] – an estimated 1.7 million Iraqi excess deaths occurred in the period 1990-2003 under the Bush I-Clinton I-Bush II Sanctions; the number of under-5 infant deaths in this period totalled 1.2 million (roughly 90% of these deaths were avoidable).

7. Global opiate drug-related deaths due to US actions [0.5 million] - 0.1 million people die each year around the world (0.6 million over 6 years) from opiate drug-related causes. Accordingly, about 0.5 million have died avoidably since 9/11 from opiate drug-related causes due to the UK-US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from about 5% of world market share in 2001 to a current 93% (see UN Office on Drugs and Crime, UNODC, 2007 World Drug Report).

A major contributor to the carnage in Occupied Palestine, Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan is the war criminal failure of the Occupiers to supply life-sustaining requisites as demanded unequivocally by the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. Thus, according the World Health Organization (WHO), the “annual total per capita medical expenditure” permitted in Occupied Iraq by the US Coalition is $135 (2004) as compared to $19 (Occupied Afghanistan), $2,560 (UK), $3,123 (Australia) and $6,096 (the US).

The Bush Asian Holocaust death toll of 8 MILLION EXCEEDS that of the Jewish Holocaust, the WW2 Nazi German-inflicted Jewish Genocide (6 million deaths, 5 million murdered and 1 million dying from deprivation) and that of the largely UN-REPORTED, “forgotten”, man-made, British-inflicted Bengali Holocaust (Bengal Famine, Bengali Genocide) of World War 2 British India (4 million excess deaths).

Quantitative or qualitative denial of the Jewish Holocaust (6 million deaths comprising 5 million murdered and 1 million deprivation-related deaths) is punished in Austria by 10 years in prison and in other countries by lengthy custodial sentences. The Iraqis, Lebanese and Palestinians are overwhelmingly SEMITES by ETHNICITY and the Afghans have a Semitic-origin, Islamic CULTURE. What we are seeing is racist, ANTI-SEMITIC, Islamophobic Holocaust Denial driven by lying, racist, Bush-ite Mainstream media.

However, as outlined at the beginning of this article, Mainstream media and politician IGNORING of horrendous realities in the Bush War on Terror and indeed, more generally in the Bush Asian Holocaust, endangers not only the security of the victim Indigenous Asian peoples but also that of the West and the World.

During the period between 1830 and 1962, France practiced brutal racial extermination in Algeria, which led to the killing of 5 million innocent civilians, yes 5 million. Not many people in this world know about this fact because the hypocrite French government, which claims human rights and freedom, doesn't want you to know about their real ugly face. Because if you know and the world knows then they would be forced to admit their war crimes and apologize to Algeria. Watch this rare video containing real pictures and discover the truth for yourself.

Not much has changed since then. The western countries countries continue to do same crimes against humanity on the Muslims in Muslim countries.

Algerian-French War For Independence

Algeria along with Tunisia and Morocco were invaded and taken over by the French after the Ottoman Empire became too weak to protect it. While in these countries the French took away peoples land and wealth thus making them poor, and bringing in their French settlers to live in these Muslim lands. The end result was that the French setters lived a life of luxury and comfort on stolen land while the native Muslims lived a life of occupation, poverty, and subjugation. The French banned the local languages (native languages and Arabic) and forced everyone to use French only . even now you can find these countries to have French as a second language and most schools are in French.

The Algerians fought for independence from 1954 to 1962. It was under these conditions the Algerians protested in France and they were tortured and massacred. While the French were held accountable for their crimes against the Jews at the same time they covered up the crimes against these Muslims. In Algeria the French military dropped bombs on Algerian Muslims from the Air, the Sea, and from the Land. They did not care who they were killing because their goal was to make everyone pay. After the war was over the French had killed over 1.5 million Algerian Muslims. This genocide is totally ignored by the world.

Below are some pictures of the type of atrocities committed by the French against the Muslims in these lands

The 1961 Massacre of Muslim Algerians in Paris by the Police

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 1 March 1997

by James J. Napoli - January 19, 2015

A Colleague of mine in Cairo told me a story a few years ago about a massacre in the streets of Paris. He was a news service reporter at the time of the violence in the French capital  Oct. 17, 1961  and saw tens of bodies of dead Algerians piled like cordwood in the center of the city in the wake of what would now be called a police riot.

But his superiors at the news agency stopped him from telling the full story then, and most of the world paid little attention to the thin news coverage that the massacre did receive. Even now, the events of that time are not widely known and many people, like myself, had never heard of them at all.

This year is an apt time to recall what happened, and not only because this is the 35th anniversary year of Algerian independence. The continuing civil war in Algeria and the growing violence and racism in France, as well as the appalling slaughters taking place elsewhere in the world, give it a disturbing currency.

Heres what happened:

Unarmed Algerian Muslims demonstrating in central Paris against a discriminatory curfew were beaten, shot, garroted and even drowned by police and special troops. Thousands were rounded up and taken to detention centers around the city and the prefecture of police, where there were more beatings and killings.

How many died? No one seems to know for sure, even now. Probably around 200.

It seems astonishing today, from this perspective, that such a thing could happen in the middle of a major Western capital closely covered by the international media. This was not Kabul, Beijing, Hebron or some Bosnian backwater, after all, but the City of Light  Paris.

But the Fifth Republic under President Charles de Gaulle was in trouble in October 1961. De Gaulle, who was primarily interested in establishing Frances pre-eminent position in Western Europe and the world, found himself presiding over domestic chaos. France was constantly disrupted by strikes and protests by farmers and workers, as well as attacks from opposing organizations: the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), representing the Algerian nationalist independence movement, and the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a group of disaffected soldiers, politicians and others committed to keeping Algeria French. The OAS rightly perceived that de Gaulle was bound to free France from the burden of its last major colonial holding, so he could get on with the business of making France the economic and political power of his lofty ambition.

Eyewitness reports recounted strangling by police.

But the vicious war in Algeria, marked by bloody atrocities committed on Algerians, had been grinding on for nearly seven years. Attacks in Paris and other French cities had claimed dozens of lives of police, provoking what Interior Minister Roger Frey called la juste colère  the just anger  of the police. They vented that anger on the evening of Oct. 17. About 30,000 Muslims  from among some 200,000 Algerians, ostensibly French citizens, living in and around Paris  descended upon the boulevards of central Paris from three different directions. The demonstration of men, women and children was called by the FLN to protest an 8:30 p.m. curfew imposed only on Muslims.

The demonstrators were met by about 7,000 police and members of special Republican Security companies, armed with heavy truncheons or guns. They let loose on the demonstrators in, among other places, Saint Germain-des-Prés, the Opéra, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysée, around the Place de lÉtoile and, on the edges of the city, at the Rond Point de la Defense beyond Neuilly.

My news agency friend counted at least 30 corpses of demonstrators in several piles outside his office near the city center, into which he had pulled some Algerians to get them away from rampaging police. Another correspondent reported seeing police backing unarmed Algerians into corners on side streets and clubbing them at will. Later eyewitness reports recounted strangling by police and the drowning of Algerians in the Seine, from which bodies would be recovered downstream for weeks to come.

Maurice Papon, the Prefect of the Paris police, was the only Vichy France official to be convicted for his role in the deportation of Jews during WW II. But Papon was never prosecuted for the deaths of Algerians caused by police under his orders in 1961. These were not the last deaths caused by police under Papons responsibility. Four months later, in February 1962, Papon went too far even for the French President Charles De Gaulle, when French police killed nine white people at a Communist-led demonstration against the war in Algeria. 700,000 people marched at the funeral of the five protesters while a general strike shut down Paris.

Thousands of Algerians were rounded up and brought to detention centers, where the violence against them continued. Drowning by Bullets, a British TV documentary aired about four years ago, alleges that scores of Algerians were murdered in full view of police brass in the courtyard of the central police headquarters. The prefect of police was Maurice Papon, who recently was still denying charges that he was responsible for deporting French Jews to Auschwitz during World War II while he was part of the Vichy government.

The official version

The full horror of this inglorious 1961 episode in French history was largely covered up at the time. Though harrowing personal accounts did eventually percolate to the surface in the French press, the newspapers  enfeebled by years of government censorship and control  for the most part stuck with official figures that only two and, later, five people had died in the demonstration. Government-owned French TV showed Algerians being shipped out of France after the demonstration, but showed none of the police violence.

Journalists had been warned away from coverage of the demonstration and were not allowed near the detention centers.

With few exceptions, the British and American press stuck to the official story, including suggestions that the Algerians had opened fire first. Even the newsman who saw the piles of Algerian corpses was not allowed to report the story; his bosses ordered that the bureau reports stick to the official figures.

Both French and foreign journalists in Paris seemed tacitly to agree that nothing should be done to further destabilize the French government or endanger de Gaulle, who was widely seen as the last, best hope for navigating France out of its troubles.

The story quickly died, drowned out by fresher alarums and excursions in Europe and elsewhere.

And, of course, in the next year, Algeria would have its independence.

Jacques Vergès, the controversial French lawyer who represented the FLN during the war in Algeria, told me in an interview last summer that the police violence and government and press cover-up in 1961 were not surprising. The political circumstances were right for it, and the news media usually do what theyre told. Just look at how easy it was to round up and intern American citizens of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor, he observed. If hes right, then the problem for politicians is to make sure that the conditions for injustice and atrocity do not conjoin, that there is no probability created for massacres like the one in Paris in October 1961. And if the politicians fail, then the problem for journalists and others is how to resist becoming their accomplices.

Report: Global War On Terror Has Killed Over 4 Million Muslims (current holocaust)

August 4, 2015

MINTPRESS) Washington, DC — A study released earlier this year revealed the shocking death toll of the United States’s “War on Terror” since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the true body count could be even higher.

Published in March by Physicians for Social Responsibility, the study, conducted by a team that included some Nobel Prize winners, determined that at least 1.3 million people have died as a result of war since Sept.11, 2001, but the real figure might be as high as two million. The study was an attempt to “close the gaps” in existing research, including studies like the Iraq Body Count,” which puts the number of violent deaths in that country at about 219,000 since 2003, based on media reports of the time period.

“For instance, although 40,000 corpses had been buried in Najaf since the launch of the war, IBC [Iraq Body Count] recorded only 1,354 deaths in Najaf for the same period. That example shows how wide the gap is between IBC’s Najaf figure and the actual death toll – in this case, by a factor of over 30.

Such gaps are replete throughout IBC’s database. In another instance, IBC recorded just three airstrikes in a period in 2005, when the number of air attacks had in fact increased from 25 to 120 that year. Again, the gap here is by a factor of 40.”

The physicians behind the study also praised a controversial report from the medical journal The Lancet that placed the toll count far higher than that of Iraq Body Count, at closer to one million dead. In addition to the war in Iraq, the PSR study added additional victims from other countries where the United States has waged war:

“To this, the PSR study adds at least 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, killed as the direct or indirect consequence of US-led war: a ‘conservative’ total of 1.3 million. The real figure could easily be ‘in excess of 2 million’.”

These figures may still be underestimating the real death toll, according to Ahmed. These studies only account for the victims of violent conflict, but not the many more who will die as a result of the damage war brings to crucial infrastructure, from roads to farms to hospitals — not to mention devastating sanctions like those placed on Iraq after the first Gulf War in 1991. He continues:

“Undisputed UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due to the West’s brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children.

The mass death was seemingly intended. Among items banned by the UN sanctions were chemicals and equipment essential for Iraq’s national water treatment system. A secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document discovered by Professor Thomas Nagy of the School of Business at George Washington University amounted, he said, to ‘an early blueprint for genocide against the people of Iraq.’”

Similar figures for Afghanistan, he reports, could bring totals to four million or more.

As Ahmed points out in his article, the majority of those killed in these wars and those suffering most from these wars, statistically speaking, were Muslim — a stark contrast to the common view that radical Muslim terrorists are the deadliest group in the Middle East. Rather, it would seem the American military are the worst killers, and the death toll resembles religious genocide. In 2009, Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, wrote in Foreign Policy:

“How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims? Coming up with a precise answer to this question is probably impossible, but it is also not necessary, because the rough numbers are so clearly lopsided.”

Oo Samah: This doesn't take in account the billions stolen by the US in forced contracts or the blood shed due to US-created conflicts and terrorists. It is without a doubt, the US is one of the deadliest and inhumane empire in history, hiding behind barriers of what they think is justice.

The world would be a much better place if a pacifist people like Japan, Finland or Netherlands were given authority over the enormous power the warmongers of the US hold.

"When I started collecting photos of the people killed in Srebrenica, the task at first seemed like a clerical one. But then I started to look at the faces."

Twenty years after Europe's worst single atrocity since World War II, RFE/RL's Dzenana Halimovic wanted to ensure that the victims -- and not just the names -- are remembered. She started collecting photographs of the people who were killed -- and now has more than 2,400 of them.

On May 14, 1948, Israel declared itself a new, independent state, and was soon thereafter attacked by assembled forces of the Arab world determined to destroy this proud, determined newcomer to the region -- or so the legend has been perpetuated for over six decades, propelled by the best-selling 1958 Leon Uris novel, Exodus, said to have originated as a PR effort to glamorize Israel and sanitize its dishonorable establishment. This was soon followed in 1960 by the Otto Preminger film that spread the myth to a much larger audience and simplified it further into essentially a cowboys and Indians tale.

Whether deliberate or inadvertent, the widespread appeal of this film may well reflect its close correspondence with America's own ethnic cleansing of our indigenous population and its whitewashed reversal of heroes and villains, where Zionism and Manifest Destiny are companion ideologies, and Israeli "settlers" match American "pioneers."

But a few salient facts have been conspicuously omitted from the legend.

Three Zionist terror groups (as designated by the United Nations) systematically planned and executed the expulsion of the Palestinians, who owned over 93% of Palestine in 1947. This ethnic cleansing operation had been prepared over the preceding year, ready for implementation when perceived necessary to drive out the indigenous Arab population and seize their land and properties once the British adminstrative authority was gone.

These terrorist "militias" had ethnically cleansed a third of the Palestinian population before the British departed in May 1948 and by the end of 1948 had driven over 3/4 million Palestinians into 59 refugee camps hastily constructed to accommodate them by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), newly created to respond to what Palestinians called their "catastrophe" - al Nakba.

Scattered Arab forces intervened after the British withdrawal, but were no match for the better-organized, better-armed and much better-funded Zionist militias now merged into the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Since most Arab countries had recently emerged from post-WWI mandates under British or French administration, the only credible Arab army was the Arab Legion of Transjordan which the Zionists co-opted in an agreement with King Abdullah of Transjordan. Under this agreement Abdullah would keep Judea and Samaria (now the West Bank) and the Zionists were allowed to "cleanse" (their term) the rest of Palestine unopposed.

By the end of the ethnic cleansing campaign, the Zionists had destroyed and/or depopulated 531 Arab villages and eleven urban areas, and had committed 33 documented massacres that killed some 13,000 largely defenseless Arabs, the most notorious of which was Dar Yassein (above). In an article three decades later for The American Zionist, Mordechai Nisan of the Truman Research Centre of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem wrote, “Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when it was.”

This was an intentional terrorist strategy. Reports of these massacres terrified other Arab villages into fleeing their homes and communities in the path of approaching Jewish forces. By 1950 nearly a million Palestinian refugees had been registered by the UN in refugee camps with land claims against Israel. With their descendents who are legal heirs to the stolen property, that number now exceeds 4½ million, the largest and longest-standing refugee population in the world. Palestinian leaders, when unable to protect the villages, had reportedly advised the residents to flee but evidence of this is lacking. Nevertheless, this has been used shamelessly by Zionist propagandists to claim that the Palestinians left voluntarily or unnecessarily upon direction by their leaders.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has declared that "catastrophe" is an inaccurate term with its connotations of natural disaster. Rather, he clearly identifies these acts as crimes that should be so identified.

Following these atrocities, some Jewish communities - which had found refuge in Arab communities from Christian persecution in Europe and lived in peace with Arabs for centuries throughout the Middle East and North Africa - fled their homes in fear of retribution for Jewish aggression in Palestine. This has been used by Zionist propagandists to imply that some sort of balanced population exchange occurred to invalidate the Palestinian right of return. But most of these Jewish immigrants to Israel were in fact recruited by Zionism and motivated by incentives and subsidies offered by the new state, including involuntarily vacated Palestinian homes, rather than escape from Arab persecution. Notably large Jewish populations immigrated to Israel from Morrocco and Yemen in response to Israeli invitations and incentives. Jewish exodus from North Africa was also motivated by contemporaneous upheavals in the region against post-war French efforts to re-establish its colonies.

Israel cast itself as a refuge, calling for "ingathering of the exiles." However, since the Mizrahi (Arab) and Sephardic (Iberian) Jews had not suffered Russian pogroms or the Holocaust, many had no interest in uprooting their long established communities for transplantation to Israel. Some Arab expulsion of their Jewish neighbors occurred in some communities due to fear of Zionism, especially in Egypt following their 1956 invasion by Israel, but this "ingathering" was largely solicited by Israel and actively encouraged by false flag Mossad attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses to frighten Jews in Egypt and Iraq into relocating.

Any legitimate Jewish refugees - like Palestinians - had the right to file claims with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. How many have done so? Whatever the number, if any, their claims are irrelevant to Palestinian claims. Most importantly, have Jewish refugees - like Palestinians - been denied the right to return? Quite the contrary. In fact, both Egypt and Iraq published prominent invitations in major newspapers for Jewish emigrants to return.

For 22 years this contested region has endured a regime of torture and disappeared civilians. Now a local laywer is discovering their unmarked graves and challenging India's abuses

by Cathy Scott-Clark - Monday 9 July 2012

One sodden evening in April 2010, an Indian army major from the 4 Rajputana Rifles arrived at a remote police post where the mountains gather in a half-hitch around Kashmir, India's northernmost state. Major Opinder Singh "seemed in a hurry", a duty policeman recalled. Up in the heights of the Pir Panjal range, down through which the major had descended, it was snowing and his boots let in water. "The officer reported that the previous night his men had killed three Pakistani terrorists who had crossed over into our Machil sector," the policeman recalled. "Where are the bodies?" the policeman had asked, filling in a First Information Report that started a criminal enquiry. "They were buried where they were shot," the major retorted, before taking off in his jeep.

"It was not unusual," the policeman later told investigators, when questioned as to why he had not insisted on viewing the corpses or checking the identities. Kashmir had been in turmoil since Partition in 1947 and on a virtual war footing for the past two decades, with some estimates placing the dead at 70,000. Strung with razor wire and anti-missile netting, the state had been transformed into one of the most militarised places on earth, with one Indian paramilitary or soldier stationed for every 17 residents. The Pakistani intelligence services and military trained and funded a legion of irregulars, who infiltrated over the mountains to kick-start a full-blown insurgency in 1989, keeping the Indian-ruled portion of the Muslim-majority state permanently alight.

Once picture-perfect, a place of pilgrimage for backpackers and mystics of all religions, Kashmir had become one of the most beautiful and dangerous frontlines in the world. Machil, the sector in which Singh had sprung his operation, was especially treacherous, consisting of a clutch of isolated villages strung along the Line of Control (LoC), a high-altitude ceasefire line that had split Kashmir in 1972. Up here in the thin air, India had created a fearsome barrier, made lethal with the help of Israeli technology, a partially electrified series of fences connected to motion detectors, surrounded by a heavily mined no-man's land.

On 30 April, 2010, an armed forces spokesman in Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, confirmed Singh's story. "Three militants have been killed in a shootout," said Lieutenant Colonel JS Brar, detailing how three AK-47s, one Pakistani pistol, ammunition, cigarettes, chocolates, dates, two water bottles, a Kenwood radio and 1,000 Pakistani rupees had been recovered. The standard-issue infiltration kit. The corpseless triple-death inquiry was an open and shut case.

However, a few days later, at Panzalla police station, 30 miles from Machil, a simple missing case was causing everyone problems. Three Kashmiri families from nearby Nadihal village had turned up to report the disappearance of their sons: Mohammad, 19, Riyaz, 20, and Shahzad, 27, an apple farmer, a herder and a labourer. They had not seen them since 28 April and would not be calmed by detectives. Soon, their appeals drew the attention of Kashmir's most dogged human rights lawyer, Parvez Imroz, whose response to what would become known as the "Machil Encounter" was about to create a watershed in Kashmir.

Dressed in the uniform of the Kashmiri bar, a crisp white shirt and sombre morning suit, over the past two decades Imroz had become a fixture at the high court in Srinagar, filing thousands of habeas corpus actions (which literally translates as "produce the bodies") on behalf of families who claimed their relatives had vanished while in the custody of the Indian security forces.

These actions rarely succeeded, the Indian army insisting that the missing had flitted over the LoC to Pakistan, recalling historic scenes at the start of the insurgency that terrified New Delhi, when tens of thousands of young Kashmiris jumped aboard buses manned by youthful conductors shouting: "Pakistan, Pakistan here we come." But what the writs did achieve was to create a paper trail from which Imroz was able to estimate that 8,000 Kashmiri non-combatants had vanished from army custody in a state the size of Ireland - four times more than disappeared under Pinochet in Chile. "The military grip has been suffocating," he told the Guardian, "and making someone vanish sows far more fear than spilling their blood".

Imroz had spent much of his career facing down security forces protected by specially drafted laws. Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, soldiers and paramilitaries enjoy total immunity from prosecution, unless the ministry of defence sanction their trial. Using new Right to Information (RTI) laws, Imroz obtained confirmation that despite the fact that hundreds of soldiers stood accused of murder, rape and torture, not a single case had proceeded. In contrast, Kashmiri citizens are dealt with using the Jammu & Kashmir Public Safety Act, under which they can be jailed, preventively, for two years, if deemed likely to commit subversive acts in the future, with an estimated 20,000 detained, according to Human Rights Watch.

Imroz's campaigning achieved other things. He caught the attention of the UN, and this year Christof Heyns, a special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, warned India that all of these draconian laws had no place in a functioning democracy and should be scrapped. The price for confronting the security forces and the militants they faced down was severe. In 1992, Imroz mourned the loss of his Hindu mentor, an activist who was gunned down by Muslim insurgents. Three years later, Imroz was driving home from court when he felt a cold draught grip his chest. "I slumped over the wheel, inexplicably," he recalled. Bystanders who came to his rescue told him he had been shot. A militant group later claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. In 1996, the Indian army abducted Imroz's friend and fellow lawyer, Jalil Andrabi, whose mutilated body was found after three weeks. Imroz shut himself off. For years he refused to marry or have children, worried they would be targeted. In 2002, his accomplished protégé, Khurram Parvez, a young Kashmiri graduate, was badly injured in an IED attack that killed his driver and a female colleague, Asiya Jeelani. Two years after that, a gunman posing as a client, shot dead another of Imroz's legal allies. In 2005, when Imroz was awarded the Ludovic-Trarieux International Human Rights Prize, first given to Nelson Mandela, he was unable to accept it in person as India declined to issue him a passport.

But Imroz's reputation began to build in the countryside, from where terrified villagers travelled to besiege his rickety chambers on the Bund, in central Srinagar, carrying with them stories. In 2008, these accounts enabled the lawyer to make his greatest discovery. While surveying disappearance cases in villages across two of Kashmir's 23 districts, including Baramulla, from where the three Nadihal men would vanish in 2010, villagers showed him a hitherto unknown network of unmarked and mass graves: muddy pits and mossy mounds, pock-marking pine forests and orchards. According to eyewitnesses, all had been dug under the gaze of the Indian security forces and all contained the bodies of local men. Some were fresh, others decayed, hinting at a covert slaughter that went back many years.

Imroz widened his search, mapping almost 1,000 locations. He was shocked by the implications. Indian law requires that the police probe every violent death and that corpses be identified. But in the village of Bimyar, white-haired Atta Muhammad Khan came forward to describe how he had been forced to inter 203 unidentified bodies under cover of the night - men whose identities and crimes were unstated. "Some corpses were disfigured. Others were burnt. We did not ask questions." It was a similar story in Kichama village, where the lawyer mapped 235 unmarked graves and in Bijhama, where 200 more unidentified corpses had been interred. In Srinagar, Imroz's team alerted the government's State Human Rights Commission (SHRC). "We suspected the missing of Kashmir were buried at these secret sites," he said, publishing a report, Facts Under Ground.

An official response came two months later, just after 10pm on 30 June, 2008. Imroz had at last married Rukhsana, a business woman, and they now had two children, his daughter Zeenish, 12, and a boy, Tauqir, aged seven. The family lived in Kralpora, a tree-lined suburb eight miles from Srinagar city centre. No one called round on the offchance. Rukhsana heard a rap at the door and glanced outside to see that their security lights had been smashed. "I knew what this meant," she said, the door knock immediately conjuring memories of murdered friends. Imroz ran to the back of the house and shouted for his brother, Sheikh Mushtaq Ahmad, who lived next door.

As Ahmad emerged with a torch, a shot was fired, narrowly missing his son. A stranger screamed: "Put that light out." Then, a grenade exploded, shrapnel pitting the front door. Tear gas shells followed, waking neighbours who unlocked the village mosque. The imam mobilised residents to surround Imroz's house, as an armoured vehicle and two jeeps from the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force and police Special Task Force, took off. "They had come to kill us," Rukhsana recalled. "We need protection," she said. Who do you need protection from, I asked her. "From our own government of course. It's jungle law."

After the attack, Human Rights Watch called on India to "protect Parvez Imroz, an award-winning human rights lawyer" and his case was raised in the European parliament. His family pleaded for him to quit. "I was terrified," the lawyer conceded. "I was starting to have horrible dreams. But being silent is a crime."

Imroz and his team redoubled their efforts, spreading their net across 55 villages in three districts, Bandipora, Baramulla and Kupwara. An ad-hoc inquiry run by volunteers and funded by donations saw the number of unmarked and mass graves mapped rise to 2,700. Inside them were 2,943 bodies; 80% of them unidentified. "These were hellish images from a war that no one has ever reported," said Imroz. "We suspected this to be prima-facie evidence of war crimes," he added. "Who are the dead, how did they die, in whose hands and who interred them?"

The SHRC finally agreed to an inquiry. Soon, it had its work cut out. Using RTI laws, the police were forced to concede that they had lodged 2,683 cases for the covertly interred in just three districts. And a new deposition submitted by Imroz's field workers covering two more districts, Rajoori and Poonch, mapped 3,844 more unmarked and mass graves, taking the total number to more than 6,000. There are still another 16 districts yet to be surveyed, leaving Imroz to wonder how many violent deaths and surreptitious burials have been concealed across Kashmir. Finally, last September, the SHRC made an announcement, stating that Imroz's discovery was correct: "There is every possibility that unidentified dead bodies buried in various unmarked graves ... may contain the victims of enforced disappearances." The UN weighed in this year, a report to the Human Rights Council warning India of its obligations under human rights treaties and laws. Kashmiri families had a "right to know the truth" and that "when the disappeared person is found to be dead, the right ... to have the remains of their loved one returned to them, and to dispose of those remains according to their own tradition, religion or culture".

After the Nadihal men disappeared, Imroz's field worker, Parvaiz Matta, travelled to the village. He found an eyewitness, Fayaz Wani, a close friend of the missing men. Wani finally revealed the Indian army had offered the men jobs, in a deal brokered by a Special Police Officer (SPO), who had given them a sum equivalent to £7 each, "as a show of good will", before taking them to a remote army camp in Machil.

The families of the missing men filed a complaint against the SPO, Bashir Lone. "This man broke down, admitting his role, claiming that nine soldiers at a remote army camp had shot the three men, so they could claim reward money," Matta said. (The army routinely gives financial rewards to soldiers who kill militants.) On 28 May, 2010, three bodies were exhumed from unmarked graves close to the camp, some of those already mapped by Imroz, and in which the government said were foreign fighters. Their families identified Shahzad, Riyaz and Mohammad by their clothes.

The Nadihal cash-for-killing story and news of a legion of unidentified dead lying in unmarked graves, sent hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on to the streets in the summer of 2010. Sensing the building anger, the army and central government in New Delhi promised an inquiry, offering, without irony, talks to anyone in Kashmir "who renounced violence". However, when no answers came, Kashmir went into convulsions, as crowds of youths armed with stones ambushed soldiers, police and paramilitaries who returned fire with live rounds. I arrived in Kashmir shortly after. More than 100 demonstrators had been killed, many of them children. International news channels briefly took an interest, asking if Kashmir was experiencing its own Arab Spring. But the cameras left quickly, as a vicious crackdown began clearing the streets: the government's own statistics showing that more than 5,300 Kashmiri youths, many of them children, were arrested.

In 2011, Imroz went to work again, investigating how India had restored the peace, and I shadowed him. He took statements from those who had been released and the families of those still incarcerated. "The affidavits made for chilling reading," he said. The majority of youths alleged torture, with independent medical examinations confirming that many had their fingernails pulled and bones crushed. One teenage prisoner told the Guardian: "The police started on our hands and fingers, breaking them with gun butts, and by the end when tears were streaming down our faces, we were hung by our ankles and had chilli rubbed in our wounds." Others claimed to have petrol funnelled into their rectums. One group alleged in court that they were forced to sodomise each other, while a police cameraman filmed.

This year, Imroz and his field workers widened the research to commence the first state-wide inquiry into the use of torture. Their findings will go to the UN and to Human Rights Watch later this summer but a draft seen by the Guardian suggests that not only is torture endemic, it is systemic. In one cluster of 50 villages, more than 2,000 extreme cases of torture were documented, any of which would kick-start an SHRC inquiry, and all of which left victims maimed and psychologically scarred. Methods included branding, electric shocks, simulated drowning, striping flesh with razor blades and piping petrol into anuses.

This work suggests that the statewide ratio for Kashmiris who have experienced torture is one in six. "For the 50 villages, in this small snapshot, we located 50 centres run by the army and paramilitaries in which torture had been practised," Imroz said. The methods, language and even the architecture of the torture chambers are identical. "What we are looking at is not a few errant officers." Files released under RTI laws show how these practises go back to 1989. These documents, seen by the Guardian, also reveal horrific practises, including one sizeable cluster, confidentially probed by the government itself, where men from the Border Security Force (BSF) lopped off the limbs of suspects and fed prisoners with their own flesh.

The Guardian traced one of the victims, a shepherd Qalandar Khatana, 45. Hobbling on crutches, bandages covering his ankles, both feet having been sawn off, he recalled: "I was held down, a BSF trooper produced a knife and then I passed out as the blood gushed from me." His file says a government investigator confirmed the story and produced eyewitnesses.

Another villager, Nasir Sheikh, a carpenter, who lost both legs below the knee and one hand, added: "The smell was of death - urine, ****, sweat. You knew you were about to be slowly murdered. It was like being thrown down a well where no one can hear you scream." His file confirms the story and suggests that compensation be paid. The UN special rapporteur on torture has been refused entry to Kashmir since 1993. Domestic legislation to outlaw torture has stalled. "When will the world start asking as tough questions of India as it is of Syria?" Imroz asked. "Or are we Kashmiris invisible?"

The Highway of Death is the name given to the horrific war crime carried out by American and Canadian forces on the night of the 26th-27th February 1991, during the Persian Gulf War.

Massive columns of Iraqi forces (including Kuwaiti hostages and civilian refugees) retreating from Kuwait in compliance with the original UN Resolution 660 were incinerated and roasted alive by a combination of air and ground forces in a secretive early test of Thermobaric weaponry - explosives that work by utilising oxygen from the surrounding air to generate an intense, high-temperature explosion.

The carnage and horror was such that George Bush Sr was forced to unilaterally declare an end to the war hours later. Like the World War II Dresden atrocity committed by the Allies, the death toll was covered up and reduced to a small fraction of the actual one. BBC estimated at the time that thousands were killed in the 7-mile-long (11km) convoy, and some estimates are in the tens of thousands - the most likely ones.

The late journalist and editor Michael Kelly wrote on the 10th March 1991 that "For a 50 or 60-mile (approximately 90km) stretch from just north of Jahra to the Iraqi border, the road was littered with exploded and roasted vehicles, charred and blown-up bodies." (Cited in "Health costs of the Gulf war" by Ian Lee and Andy Haines.)

Let the enormity of that sink in for a moment: 90 kilometres of wrecked vehicles and human remains. Kelly was also the first American journalist to be killed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In an additional event that happened alongside and was suppressed all together, a number of US Bradley Fighting Vehicles massacred a group of more than 350 disarmed Iraqi soldiers who had escaped the highway and surrendered at a checkpoint. The US Military Intelligence personnel who had been manning the checkpoint narrowly escaped with their own lives - they were fired on by the same vehicles and managed to flee in their humvees.

Iraq had committed the cardinal sin of attacking Israel during the war, and so there was a terrible price to pay.

"Allied forces bombed them from the air, killing thousands in their vehicles on what become known as the "Highway of Death".

The indiscriminate bombing of tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and civilians retreating from Kuwait is one of the most heinous war crimes in history.

by By Joyce Chediac - February 27, 2016

I want to give testimony on what are called the "highways of death." These are the two Kuwaiti roadways, littered with remains of 2,000 mangled Iraqi military vehicles, and the charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, who were withdrawing from Kuwait on February 26th and 27th 1991 in compliance with UN resolutions.

US planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. "It was like shooting fish in a barrel," said one US pilot. The horror is still there to see.

On the inland highway to Basra is mile after mile of burned, smashed, shattered vehicles of every description - tanks, armored cars, trucks, autos, fire trucks, according to the March 18, 1991, Time magazine. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun, says the Los Angeles Times of March 11, 1991. While 450 people survived the inland road bombing to surrender, this was not the case with the 60 miles of the coastal road. There for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it's impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel.

"Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic," said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. This one-sided carnage, this racist mass murder of Arab people, occurred while White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater promised that the US and its coalition partners would not attack Iraqi forces leaving Kuwait. This is surely one of the most heinous war crimes in contemporary history.

The Iraqi troops were not being driven out of Kuwait by US troops as the Bush administration maintains. They were not retreating in order to regroup and fight again. In fact, they were withdrawing, they were going home, responding to orders issued by Baghdad, announcing that it was complying with Resolution 660 and leaving Kuwait. At 5:35 p.m. (Eastern standard Time) Baghdad radio announced that Iraq's Foreign Minister had accepted the Soviet cease-fire proposal and had issued the order for all Iraqi troops to withdraw to positions held before August 2, 1990 in compliance with UN Resolution 660. President Bush responded immediately from the White House saying (through spokesman Marlin Fitzwater) that "there was no evidence to suggest the Iraqi army is withdrawing. In fact, Iraqi units are continuing to fight... We continue to prosecute the war." On the next day, February 26, 1991, Saddam Hussein announced on Baghdad radio that Iraqi troops had, indeed, begun to withdraw from Kuwait and that the withdrawal would be complete that day. Again, Bush reacted, calling Hussein's announcement "an outrage" and "a cruel hoax."

Eyewitness Kuwaitis attest that the withdrawal began the afternoon of February 26, 1991 and Baghdad radio announced at 2:00 AM (local time) that morning that the government had ordered all troops to withdraw.

The massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva Conventions of 1949, Common Article III, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who are out of combat. The point of contention involves the Bush administration's claim that the Iraqi troops were retreating to regroup and fight again. Such a claim is the only way that the massacre which occurred could be considered legal under international law. But in fact the claim is false and obviously so. The troops were withdrawing and removing themselves from combat under direct orders from Baghdad that the war was over and that Iraq had quit and would fully comply with UN resolutions. To attack the soldiers returning home under these circumstances is a war crime.

Iraq accepted UN Resolution 660 and offered to withdraw from Kuwait through Soviet mediation on February 21, 1991. A statement made by George Bush on February 27, 1991, that no quarter would be given to remaining Iraqi soldiers violates even the US Field Manual of 1956. The 1907 Hague Convention governing land warfare also makes it illegal to declare that no quarter will be given to withdrawing soldiers. On February 26, 1991, the following dispatch was filed from the deck of the USS. Ranger, under the byline of Randall Richard of the Providence Journal:

Air strikes against Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait were being launched so feverishly from this carrier today that pilots said they took whatever bombs happened to be closest to the flight deck. The crews, working to the strains of the Lone Ranger theme, often passed up the projectile of choice . . . because it took too long to load.

New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd wrote, "With the Iraqi leader facing military defeat, Mr. Bush decided that he would rather gamble on a violent and potentially unpopular ground war than risk the alternative: an imperfect settlement hammered out by the Soviets and Iraqis that world opinion might accept as tolerable." In short, rather than accept the offer of Iraq to surrender and leave the field of battle, Bush and the US military strategists decided simply to kill as many Iraqis as they possibly could while the chance lasted. A Newsweek article on Norman Schwarzkopt, titled "A Soldier of Conscience" (March 11, 1991), remarked that before the ground war the general was only worried about "How long the world would stand by and watch the United States pound the living hell out of Iraq without saying, 'Wait a minute - enough is enough.' He [Schwarzkopf] itched to send ground troops to finish the job." The pretext for massive extermination of Iraqi soldiers was the desire of the US to destroy Iraqi equipment. But in reality the plan was to prevent Iraqi soldiers from retreating at all. Powell remarked even before the start of the war that Iraqi soldiers knew that they had been sent to Kuwait to die. Rick Atkinson of the Washington Post reasoned that "the noose has been tightened" around Iraqi forces so effectively that "escape is impossible" (February 27, 1991). What all of this amounts to is not a war but a massacre.

There are also indications that some of those bombed during the withdrawl were Palestinians and Iraqi civilians. According to Time magazine of March 18, 1991, not just military vehicles, but cars, buses and trucks were also hit. In many cases, cars were loaded with Palestinian families and all their possessions. US press accounts tried to make the discovery of burned and bombed household goods appear as if Iraqi troops were even at this late moment looting Kuwait. Attacks on civilians are specifically prohibited by the Geneva Accords and the 1977 Conventions.

How did it really happen? On February 26, 1991 Iraq had announced it was complying with the Soviet proposal, and its troops would withdraw from Kuwait. According to Kuwaiti eyewitnesses, quoted in the March 11, 1991 Washington Post, the withdrawal began on the two highways, and was in full swing by evening. Near midnight, the first US bombing started. Hundreds of Iraqis jumped from their cars and their trucks, looking for shelter. US pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500 pound bombs. Can you imagine that on a car or truck? US forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions.

The victims were not offering resistance. They weren't being driven back in fierce battle, or trying to regroup to join another battle. They were just sitting ducks, according to Commander Frank Swiggert, the Ranger Bomb Squadron leader. According to an article in the March 11, 1991 Washington Post, headlined "US Scrambles to Shape View of Highway of Death," the US government then conspired and in fact did all it could to hide this war crime from the people of this country and the world. What the US government did became the focus of the public relations campaign managed by the US Central Command in Riyad, according to that same issue of the Washington Post. The typical line has been that the convoys were engaged in "classic tank battles," as if to suggest that Iraqi troops tried to fight back or even had a chance of fighting back. The truth is that it was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend themselves.

The Washington Post says that senior officers with the US Central Command in Riyad became worried that what they saw was a growing public perception that Iraqi forces were leaving Kuwait voluntarily, and that the US pilots were bombing them mercilessly, which was the truth. So the US government, says the Post, played down the evidence that Iraqi troops were actually leaving Kuwait.

US field commanders gave the media a carefully drawn and inaccurate picture of the fast-changing events. The idea was to portray Iraq's claimed withdrawal as a fighting retreat made necessary by heavy allied military pressure. Remember when Bush came to the Rose Garden and said that he would not accept Saddam Hussein's withdrawal? That was part of it, too, and Bush was involved in this cover up. Bush's statement was followed quickly by a televised military briefing from Saudi Arabia to explain that Iraqi forces were not withdrawing but were being pushed from the battlefield. In fact, tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers around Kuwait had begun to pull away more than thirty-six hours before allied forces reached the capital, Kuwait City. They did not move under any immediate pressure from allied tanks and infantry, which were still miles from Kuwait City.

This deliberate campaign of disinformation regarding this military action and the war crime that it really was, this manipulation of press briefings to deceive the public and keep the massacre from the world is also a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, the right of the people to know.

Court finds state must compensate relatives of victims handed over by Dutch UN peacekeepers

06.27.2017

A court has ruled that the Dutch government is partially liable for the deaths of around 300 Muslim men killed in the Srebrenica massacre.

The Hague court of appeal’s findings largely upheld a civil court judgment from 2014, which found the state was liable for the murder of Bosniak Muslims who were turned to Bosnian Serb troops by Dutch UN peacekeepers.

Presiding judge Gepke Dulek-Schermers said that Dutch soldiers “knew or should have known that the men were not only being screened ... but were in real danger of being subjected to torture or execution”.

“By having the men leave the compound unreservedly, they were deprived of a chance of survival,” he added.

In a departure from an earlier ruling, the court said the Netherlands should pay only 30 per cent of damages to victims’ families, after estimating odds of 70 per cent that the victims would have been dragged from the base and killed regardless of what action Dutch soldiers took.

The amount of damages will be determined in a separate hearing unless the victims and the state can reach a settlement.

The court rejected a claim from the relatives of other Srebrenica victims, who argued that Dutch government should also be held responsible for the protection of thousands more Muslims who had gathered outside the military base.

Judges have acquitted Netherlands of responsibility for more than 7,000 other victims killed in the Srebrenica area.

“This is a great injustice,” said Munira Subasic of the Mothers of Srebrenica group. “The Dutch state should take its responsibility for our victims because they could have kept them all safe on the Dutchbat [Dutch battalions’] compound.”

Their lawyer, Marco Gerritsen, called the court's assessment of the men's chances of survival “very arbitrary” and said he was looking at the possibility of appealing to the Dutch Supreme Court.

The case is the first time a country has been held liable for the actions of peacekeeping forces operating under a UN mandate.

The Dutch government resigned in 2002 after acknowledging its failure to protect refugees, although the Netherlands maintains that the Bosnian Serbs, not Dutch troops, bear responsibility for the killings.

Around 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed in a genocidal campaign by Bosnian Serb forces in the 1995 massacre – the worst mass murder in Europe since the Second World War.

Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, had been formally designated a “safe area” by the UN Security Council two years before, sparking condemnation of its strategy.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia concluded that the killings at Srebrenica, compounded by the mass expulsion of Bosniak civilians, amounted to genocide and pinned principal responsibility on senior officers in the Bosnian Serb army.

The UN and its Western supporters have accepted a portion of responsibility for failing to protect men, women and children uprooted from their homes in the Bosnian War.

Srebrenica was targeted by Bosnian Serb forces as part of efforts to annex the territory and expel Bosniak civilians, who were subjected to a siege and food embargoes ahead of the massacre.

A military advance on the town started in July 1995, seeing Bosnian Serb forces burning Bosniak homes as they advanced, sending thousands of civilians fleeing Srebrenica for the nearby village of Potocari, where around 200 Dutch peacekeepers were stationed.

Some of the Dutch surrendered, while others withdrew and are not known to have fired on the advancing Bosnian Serb forces headed by Ratko Mladic, who told journalists the time had come to “take revenge on the Muslims”.

On the night of 11 July, more than 10,000 Bosniak men set off from Srebrenica through dense forest in an attempt to reach safety, but were found the following morning by Bosnian Serb officers who made false promises of security to encourage the men to surrender.

Thousands surrendered or were captured, while others were forced out of Potocari by a campaign of murder and rape as women and children were transported back to Bosniak territory on buses.

Men and boys were taken to holding sites and executed en masse over several days, with estimates of the final death toll ranging between 7,000 and more than 8,000.

Their bodies were dumped in mass graves, which were later bulldozed and scattered among other burial sites in an attempt to hide evidence of the atrocity.

A UN criminal tribunal indicted more than 20 people for their involvement, including Bosnian Serb commanders, while Mladic was caught in 2011 and is on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity.

The situation in Srebenica is the exact opposite of that in Germany, which has fully acknowledged the Holocaust and apologised for the crimes committed by the Nazis

Once every year, the Mothers of Srebrenica host a ceremony to remember their fathers, sons, husbands and brothers who were hunted down and systematically murdered by Serbian forces on 11 July 1995. They were killed because they were Muslim.

This intensely moving event is held in the Potocari cemetery, where some of the 8,000 victims whose bodies have been found are buried. Many more are thought to remain undiscovered in the surrounding mountains.

The graveyard is opposite the United Nations base which was fatally abandoned by Dutch peacekeepers, a decision which gave the green light for the Srebenica genocide to take place.

Normally the ceremony is a restrained, dignified event, attended by prime ministers, political leaders and diplomats from around the world as well as local people.

But there is a sinister and frightening backdrop to next week’s commemoration.

Last October, Srebenica elected Mladen Grujicic, a Serbian mayor with an ultra nationalist history.

Grujicic - whose father was a Serb soldier killed in the early days of the civil war – will not accept that the Srebenica massacres amounted to genocide.

Usually the mayor of Srebenica plays a major role in organising the ceremony. Not this year.

Camil Durakovic, President of the Organising Committee and himself a former mayor, told us that "the mayor was not invited because he denies the genocide".

Munira Subasic, president of the Mothers of Srebrenica, told us that "anybody who denies genocide is not welcome in the memorial centre".

Subasic, 67, lost her son Nermin and husband Hilmo in the genocide. She said: "In a town where genocide was committed, having a genocide denier as a mayor is unacceptable."

Her organisation speaks for an estimated 6,000 women who lost loved ones on 11 July 1995.The denial of genocide

How can it be that Srebenica has elected a genocide denier just two decades after the deliberate, cold-blooded massacre of more than 8,000 Muslims in this once sleepy Bosnian town?
It is as if Buchenwald or Belsen had elected a Holocaust denier as mayor in the aftermath of World War Two.

The answer is grim. The massacre of Bosnian Muslims (so-called “Bosniaks”) in 1995 worked only too well.

Srebrenica is located in the Bosnian Republika Srpska, hard by the border with neighbouring Serbia. The Serbs ethnically cleansed the area – today a largely autonomous Serb majority statelet within Bosnia - during the civil war, and Bosnian Muslims who return have not been made welcome.

Most of the town's former Muslim residents are either dead or have emigrated. Srebrenica is now controlled by Bosnian Serbs, many of whom refuse to accept that a genocide took place.

Nedzad Avdic, a survivor of the genocide, told us: "Our first child is starting at the local school. They are being taught that the genocide never happened.
“You turn on the TV and it is like the war never ended."

Avdic was severely injured after he survived a mass shooting, and went into hiding for several days. He watched hundreds more killed as he hid in the undergrowth.

He told us that he and his family - his wife is another survivor - tried hard to make a life in Srebenica.

Now they accept that they have no choice but to move away.

Mejra Dzogaz, whose sons were murdered in the hills around Srebenica, tells us that she regularly sees the killers around the town. Some hold offices in local government, others are senior figures in the local police force.Mayor alleges fake graves in cemetery

The situation in Srebenica is the exact opposite of that in Germany, which has fully acknowledged the Holocaust, honoured the victims, and apologised for the crimes committed by the Nazis.

Not so in Bosnia, where many Serbs remain in denial.

In April, Grujicic told local media that he had uncovered “a lot of evidence” that the graves in the cemetery where the memorial took place were fake - and that the victims they supposedly memorialised were still alive. “The list of victims should be revised and changed,” he insisted.

Grujicic was supported in his election campaign by another genocide denier, Milorad Dodik.
In 2010 Dodik said Srebrenica "did not happen", adding that "If a genocide happened, then it was committed against Serb people."

He argued that "women, children and the elderly were killed en masse" by Bosniak Muslims.

The fact that Dodik is also the president of Republika Srpska shows the extent to which genocide denial is integral to Serbian nationalism, more then two decades later.

Serb ultra-nationalists are an increasing presence in the town, according to former mayor Camil Durakovic, himself a Muslim.

He fled from Srebrenica to Bosnian-held Tuzla during the genocide, only to be reunited with his father and older brother in the United States. Durakovic thought they had been killed, but instead they were transported to concentration camps in Serbia. He returned to Srebrenica in 2005.

Durakovic, who served as mayor from 2012 to 2016, says regular gatherings of Serb nationalists were common while he was mayor, but that his office would also denounce them every time they happened.

Now he accuses the new mayor of standing by while these rallies become larger and more frequent. He told us that "even every day in the town, I see people wearing Chetnik shirts, and flying flags," a reference to the Chetnik ideology of "Greater Serbia" that underlies Serb nationalism.

"The new mayor has given the Serb nationalists a space to operate in," the former mayor said. He said that hundreds of Serb radicals gather on Orthodox Christian saints days, singing and demonstrating adding that some come from across the border in Serbia, from across the river Drina.

Chillingly, Grujicic appears to have an ally in Donald Trump. The US president hosted the genocide-denying Srebrenica mayor at his Prayer Breakfast in Washington last February.
Taking into account Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric, and that of his advisers and followers, the link could hardly be more alarming.

This Is How Bosniaks Commemorate The Srebrenica Massacre And Why It’s Important To Remember It

22 years ago, in July 1995, more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim boys and men were brutally murdered by Serbian forces in the city of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Today, we remember the victims of the massacre.

During the Bosnian war, that lasted from 1992 until 1995, Srebrenica was declared a safe area. In the spring of 1993, the city was placed under protection of the UN peacekeeping units that mostly consisted of Dutch army officers. The people in Srebrenica were promised to be protected from the cruelties of the war. However, on July 6th Serbian forces invaded Srebrenica and between July 11th and July 22nd the execution of Bosniak men and boys took place. Thousands of men were executed and buried in mass graves, children were killed before their mothers’ eyes, women were raped and left without fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. “These were truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history,” as said by Fouad Riad, International Criminal Tribunal Judge. Recent research revealed that the USA and Britain knew six weeks before the massacre took place that the enclave would fall. The world stood by and watched the biggest manslaughter after WWII on European soil take place.

Bosniaks don’t only remember the war and honor its victims on July 11th, but they do it throughout the whole year. For instance, the victims of the Srebrenica genocide in particular get remembered when Bosniaks visit the village Potočari in the Srebrenica municipality, where the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial Cemetery is located. But nonetheless July 11th is an important day for us. We remember the victims of the massacre in a couple of ways. First of all, Srebrenica is in the Bosnian news a couple of days prior to July 11th. The news goes from letting us know how many new bodies have been found and identified to images and videos of new graves being dug up to burry those bodies. Also, every year thousands of people visit Srebrenica on July 11th to commemorate the victims of the genocide. Since 2005 in Bosnia the “Marš Mira” (March of Peace) is being organized in which thousands of Bosnians and other people partake. The participants walk for a couple of days through the country to Potočari. The participants arrive a day prior to the mass funeral on July 11th when the new found bodies of the massacre are buried. Since the war has forced a lot of people to flee the country and settle elsewhere, the Srebrenica Massacre is also being commemorated all over the world by Bosniaks. From The Hague to Toronto, Bosniaks gather together to honor those who died for their country. People who cannot go to Srebrenica usually spend the day at home watching the ceremony on television. Some of us also show solidarity and honour the victims by wearing the Flower of Srebrenica on our clothes. The green colour of the flower symbolises hope, the white colour symbolises innocence and the 11 petals represent July 11th.

The genocide in Srebrenica is well-documented, but somehow unknown and even forgotten. It’s difficult to understand how the Bosnian war doesn’t make it to history classes. The war has left emotional scars on its survivors and two decades after it ended the country still hasn’t healed from it. For most people a war is something that is far away, something that cannot come close to them. But today, we need to remember that it is closer to us than we’d like to admit. We need to remember the atrocity and injustice Bosniaks faced only 22 years ago. We need to remember that the western world turned its back and failed to protect innocent lives. Today we honour the victims of the Srebrenica Massacre, but maybe this can also be the start to remember the victims of the Bosnian war in the whole country, and victims of wars all over the world.

Four years ago today the Egyptian army stormed a sit-in at Cairo’s Rabaa square and slaughtered 1,000 people who were protesting against the removal of the country’s first democratically elected President, Mohammed Morsi. People were shot, burnt alive and suffocated with tear gas. Security forces blocked the entrances so that ambulances couldn’t get in to treat the wounded.

What: Rabaa Massacre
When: 14 August 2013
Where: Egypt

What happened?

After Morsi was ousted in a military coup on 3 July 2013 the Muslim Brotherhood called for counter-protests at Rabaa Al-Adawiya and Al-Nahda squares. Some 85,000 people joined the sit-ins.

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been demonstrating outside the Rabaa Al-Adawiya Mosque in Cairo for 47 days when security forces attacked at around 6am on 14 August 2013.

Security forces shot indiscriminately into the crowd, set fire to the tents people had gathered in and threw tear gas into the masses. Armoured vehicles and bulldozers advanced on the protesters.

Some 1,000 people were killed, thousands injured and over 800 people were arrested.What happened next?

Supposedly liberal figures like the author Alaa Al-Aswany endorsed the massacre, as did the state media. “They are a group of terrorists and fascists,” Al-Aswany said.

Despite the fact that the police and army opened fire and used excessive force, since that day not a single security officer has been brought to trial or been held accountable for the massacre.

In 2015 the government renamed the square after Hisham Barakat, the public prosecutor who presided over the acquittal of Hosni Mubarak.

Authorities widened their crackdown, not just targeting members of the Muslim Brotherhood but anyone who opposes the regime. They arrested thousands, tortured them, denied them medical attention in prison and forcibly disappearing them.

Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights both conducted independent investigations into the massacre and concluded that it had been launched on predominantly unarmed protesters.

Despite this the international community resumed arms exports to Egypt shortly after the massacre and have generally sought to strengthen ties with the Sisi regime.

This September will be the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Sabra-Shatila Massacre in West Beirut. Three thousand unarmed refugees were killed from 15-18 September 1982.

I was then a young orthopedic trainee who had resigned from St Thomas Hospital to join the Christian Aid Lebanon medical team to help those wounded by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. That invasion, named “Peace for Galilee”, and launched on 6 June 1982, mercilessly bombarded Lebanon by air, sea, and land. Water, food, electricity, and medicines were blockaded. This resulted in untold wounded and deaths, with 100,000 made suddenly homeless.

I was summoned to the Palestine Red Crescent Society to take charge of the orthopedic department in Gaza Hospital in Sabra- Shatila Palestinian refugee camp, West Beirut. I met Palestinian refugees in their bombed out homes and learned how they became refugees in one of the 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Before this encounter, I had never heard of Palestinians.

They recounted stories of being driven out of their homes in Palestine in 1948, often fleeing massacres at gunpoint. They fled with whatever possessions they could carry and found themselves in neighboring Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

The United Nations put them in tents while the world promised they would return home soon. That expectation never materialized. Since then the 750,000 refugees, comprising half of the population of Palestine in 1948, continued to live in refugee camps in the neighboring countries. It was 69 years ago that this refugee crisis started. The initial 750,000 has since grown to 5 million. Palestine was erased from the map of the world and is now called Israel.

Soon after my arrival, the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) evacuated. It was the price demanded by Israel to stop the further relentless bombardment of Lebanon and to lift the ten-week military blockade. Fourteen thousand able-bodied men and women from the PLO evacuated with the guarantee by Western powers that their families left behind would be protected by a multinational peacekeeping force.

Those leaving were soldiers, civil servants, doctors, nurses, lecturers, unionists, journalists, engineers, and technicians. The PLO was the Palestinians’ government in exile and the largest employer. Through evacuation, fourteen thousand Palestinian families lost their breadwinner, often the father or the eldest brother, in addition to those killed by the bombs.

That ceasefire lasted only three weeks. The multinational peacekeeping force, entrusted by the ceasefire agreement to protect the civilians left behind, abruptly withdrew. On September 15, several hundred Israeli tanks drove into West Beirut. Some of them ringed and sealed off Sabra-Shatila to prevent the inhabitants from fleeing. The Israelis sent their allies; a group of Christian militiamen trained and armed by them, into the camp. When the tanks withdrew from the perimeter of the camp on the 18 September, they left behind 3,000 dead civilians. Another seventeen thousand were abducted and disappeared.

Our hospital team, who had worked non-stop for 72 hours, was ordered to leave our patients at machine-gun point and marched out of the camp. As I emerged from the basement operating theatre, I learned the painful truth. While we were struggling to save a few dozen lives, people were being butchered by the thousands. Some of the bodies were already rotting in the hot Beirut sun. The images of the massacre are deeply seared into my memory: dead and mutilated bodies lining the camp alleys.

Only a few days before, they were human beings full of hope and life, rebuilding their homes, talking to me, trusting that they would be left in peace to raise their young ones after the evacuation of the PLO. These were people who welcomed me into their broken homes. They served me Arabic coffee and whatever food they found; simple fare but given with warmth and generosity. They shared their lives with me. They showed me faded photographs of their homes and families in Palestine before 1948 and the large house keys they still kept with them. The women showed me their beautiful embroidery, each with motifs of the villages they left behind. Many of these villages were destroyed after they left.

Some of these people became patients we failed to save. Others died on arrival. They left behind orphans and widows. A wounded mother begged us to take down the hospital’s last unit of blood from her to give to her child. She died shortly afterward. Children witnessed their mothers and sisters being raped and killed.

The terrified faces of families rounded up by gunmen while awaiting death; the desperate young mother who tried to give me her baby to take to safety; the stench of decaying bodies as mass graves continued to be uncovered will never leave me. The piercing cries of women who discovered the remains of their loved ones from bits of clothes, refugee identity cards, as more bodies were found continue to haunt me.

The people of Sabra Shatila returned to live in those very homes where their families and neighbors were massacred. They are a courageous people and there was nowhere else to go. Afterwards, other refugee camps were also blockaded, attacked and more people were killed. Today, Palestinian refugees are denied work permits in 30 professions and 40 artisan trades outside their camps. They have no passports. They are prohibited from owning and inheriting property. Denied the right of return to their homes in Palestine, they are not only born refugees, they will also die refugees and so will their children.

But for me, painful questions need to be answered. Not why they died, but why were they massacred as refugees? After 69 years, has the world already forgotten? How can we allow a situation where a person’s only claim to humanity is a refugee identity card? These questions have haunted me and they have yet to receive answers.